Most campaign strategists declare the beginning of the general election season on Labor Day. Both parties have wrapped up their conventions, polling is settling down, and the real race begins. We've reached that point, and the polling says one thing: this is a tight race, with fundamentals that continue favoring Donald Trump. Kamala Harris is running behind where both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were at this point.

On Labor Day, Kamala Harris holds a 1.8-point lead over Donald Trump in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. ABC News pollsters looked through their data and didn't find a bounce for Harris in the convention aftermath—and they gave Harris some of her better numbers.

Nate Silver's model holds that things are effectively tied right now. If you're a Democrat, this is not where you want things to be. There was a hope among Democrats that Biden dropping out, coalescing around Harris, announcing Walz, and boosting all this at the convention would result in a series of polling bumps that would prove insurmountable.

That didn't pan out. Instead, we're not far from the evenly divided race that existed before Joe Biden gave the worst debate performance in United States history.

Politico summarized the situation for Democratic voters as follows: "Because of Republicans' advantage in the Electoral College, a race that Harris leads nationally by between 2 and 4 percentage points, on average, is the equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth, and it's set to be decided in a smaller-than-usual number of states."

Note that the "Republican advantage in the Electoral College" means people are living outside the coastal states, forcing Democrats to pay attention to them. Politico sums it up again:

In short: Harris is narrowly ahead in the Rust Belt — which would be enough to win — but Trump is breathing down her neck. And those are also the states where the polling has been least accurate and specifically underestimated Trump in the past two elections. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton led Trump in all three states in 2016, only to lose them. And now-President Joe Biden's prospects looked like a slam dunk going into the 2020 election, but he barely escaped with victories in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Mark Halperin noted in his reporting that Harris and her campaign were making campaign stops in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Virginia, all three considered safe blue states. However, during Biden's plunge in the polls, Trump started making real inroads in these states with voters.

Harris has a tighter runway than any previous candidate because she's spent so little time in the field. She's at a disadvantage because she was never chosen in the primaries, and her campaign is trying to pitch her as the "anything" candidate without ever taking a shot from the press or anyone else.

For most people, when Harris speaks during the debate, it'll be the first time she defines herself to them. Her campaign's early failures when rolling out policy speak to how difficult this road is for her.

And then there's where Harris is now versus previous races. In 2016, Hillary Clinton had a 4.1-point lead to start September. Her actual victory in the popular vote would shrink to 2.1 points. In 2020, Joe Biden had a 7.2-point lead over Trump in the polls, which would dwindle to 4.5 points on Election Day.

Harris only has a 1.8-point lead over Trump in the polls. She's underperforming both Clinton and Biden. If these polling averages for Labor Day were dead on accurate for Election Day, Harris would also underperform both Clinton and Biden in the actual vote percentages.

In order to win, Harris has to figure out how to win Biden voters back across the Midwest and elsewhere. While it's easy to find tight polls in the swing states, it's also easy to see where she could be seeing a mirage from all the excited media buzz. As that ebbs, reality is starting to take hold.

That's why Harris is scrambling to hold events in light blue states like Virginia, New Hampshire, and Minnesota. She would only do that if the campaign's internal polling shows far less rosy numbers than we're getting in public opinion polls. Democrats have seen their public polling leads vanish on Election Day; they can't afford to fly blind right now.

As the general election season begins in earnest, the data points continually to a race that favors Trump. Kamala Harris has polled better than Biden, but she's not at an escape velocity that changes everything about the race.

It's still Trump's race to lose.